Orange is the New Black Destroys the "Television" Genre

I would write that Orange Is the New Black, the latest piece of original programming from Netflix, is the best new television show of the moment, if that weren't so obviously the wrong way to describe it. By now, it is a cliché that Netflix is reshaping the television landscape,

creating shows for its online service that coincide with the way people actually watch TV in the twenty-first century — i.e., on their computers, in one big burst. But while Netflix's maiden effort, House of Cards, was a wonderful television show for a digital medium, Orange Is the New Black is the first properly digital show. It reveals the possibilities of a new form, perhaps a new genre. And for people who love stories, the possibilities of this new genre are fabulously exciting.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Based on a memoir by the same name, Orange loosely follows the story of Piper Chapman, an upper-middle-class woman sentenced to 15 months in prison for running dirty money a decade earlier while in a relationship with a lesbian drug dealer. The contrast between Piper's pre-incarceration life and her days in jail functions as the show's source of horrific comedy: a rich, entitled Smith grad learning the absurd and terrifying ropes of a world where groups are explicitly divided into racial categories, and a seemingly innocent complaint about the food can lead to a forced starvation campaign.

Part of the fascination of the show is its documentary voyeurism: how the shower works, how solitary confinement works, how lesbian affairs are managed, how the networks of power are established and maintained. In this, Chapman is little more than a lens for the audience that Netflix believes is watching the show: of the same class, of the same intellectual background, reading Gone Girl, listening to NPR, desperate to be in the Modern Love column in The New York Times.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The real strength of Orange, though, beyond its procedural elements, is its ensemble setup: There are dozens of characters in the prison, women who have murdered, who have smuggled drugs, who have robbed, who are so varied in their motivations for terrible decisions. The prison is more or less an excuse to explore who they are and how they made such bad choices. Their origin stories are told in brief, fragmentary flashbacks that keep you watching in the hope that the next episode will have more backstory of one of the characters you've come to love. And there are so many characters to love.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

There is also an "almost incredible amounts of vagina talk, action, and imagery," a friend of mine noted, concluding that "Orange is to vaginas what The Wire is to guns." But while ithas more female actresses than any show I've ever seen, the femininity is mostly stripped away. The women are all dressed in orange or khaki jumpsuits, and with the exception of the assistant warden — one of the show's two purely unsympathetic characters — their only conventional physical expression of their gender is their hair. There is no caged heat in this prison picture; even the lesbian scenes involve no cuddling, no tenderness. A bloody tampon is served in a sandwich as punishment. A screwdriver is used for masturbation. Pregnancy is negotiated by means of Santeria and simulated rape. These women own nothing—not even their bodies, as Chapman finds out when a guard unceremoniously feels her up during a pat-down. They are their brains, and they are their vaginas. Everything else has been taken away. And that's the starting point from which all action and characterization stem.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Such an extraordinarily complicated, original portrait of women is only possible on Netflix. Because it is so completely character-based, Orange can be much looser and more tangential — relying not on classic story arcs, but on the incredibly rich characterization on display. Once you enter Chapman's world, the world of the prison, it is nearly impossible to tear yourself away. Sure, there is still some old-fashioned TV show scaffolding — hourlong installments, opening and closing credits, cliff-hangers, etc. — but I wonder how much longer all that will remain. Why pretend to be this antique formerly known as a television show? Why not finally fully embrace the idea of a thirteen-hour digital show? That's how I consumed it, anyway. I watched the whole thing in two days, and when I wasn't watching it I was thinking about watching it.

The golden age of cable, which didn't need mass audiences, only devoted ones, allowed for a wealth of terrific antihero dramas, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Brett Martin's recent book Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution has sparked some debate by connecting ideas of tortured masculinity with this golden age.

But if Orange Is the New Black is any indication, the new digital era will not be nearly so masculine or so focused on individual heroes. The most fascinating difference between a show like Breaking Bad and Orange is the social message. The former is about individual characters trying to survive a collapsing society; the latter is about how people construct a society when everything has already fallen apart, with an emphasis on cooperation and savvy consensus-building over raw aggression and individualism (although we'll see what happens next season). With that shift comes a whole new universe of possible meanings to explore. Orange Is the New Black is at the beginning. I can't wait for the rest.